Friday, August 11, 2017

New to Me No. 7: Big Thief, Masterpiece

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As
noted above, I almost saw Big Thief earlier this year. Well, factually, I saw
them – as in the people in the band – only I didn’t see them play. The opening
acts – one, a super sleepy acoustic act from (I think) Seattle and, the other, something
like a jam band – exhausted my wife’s patience at least an hour before Big
Thief took the stage.

Artist/Album

Big
Thief, Masterpiece

The
Gateway Drug

“Masterpiece,”
a mid-tempo(?) song built from plunging hooks, thick picking and crashing cymbals.

The
Backstory

When
I heard “Masterpiece” (the song, not the album), 1) I went onto a playlist
immediately after the first couplet (“Years, days, makes no difference to me,
babe/You always look exactly the same…to me”), and 2) it felt like the album
could go just about anywhere. The line, "there's only so much lettin' go you can ask someone to do," doesn't hurt, either.

Adrianne
Lenker, Big Thief’s front-person (lead vocals/guitar), has something like the
best possible voice for a song like “Masterpiece” – clear, resolute but with a
flutter of anxiety in the way it cracks (I guess? Is that a crack?). The
contrast lurks in the song in that weakness that lets the narrator hold onto
the dodgy relationship(s), while also holding the whole damned thing together. Lenker
mumbles as much as she sings – and to good effect (e.g., bone-weary) – so, for
all the times I’ve heard this song (takes counting by tens), I could never sort
it out without checking the lyrics. Looks like the songs examines a number of
relationship, notably the way one aspects of one relationship bleeds into
another, and another, and so on.

It’s
a dramatic song, musically, which lends it a little immensity – clunky phrasing
is deliberate – so, to start a good habit (e.g., actually naming the band),
credit to Buck Meek (other guitar), Max Oleartchik (bass), and James Krivchenia
(drums) for providing Lenker’s pipes such a lovely stage.

The
Album

To
be honest (and stop me if I’ve said this before), Big Thief inspired this whole
“New to Me” project. Driven to curiosity by “Masterpiece” (again, the song),
this was one of the first albums I dug into after hearing a big set of singles…and
to which I had a very specific reaction. Sit through “Little Arrow,” though – a
brittle tune played and sung at a mourning drone – it’s not a song to send you racing
to a live show. That’s one thing that made it hard to sell my wife on sticking
around past her bedtime after that first sleepy acoustic act.

“Masterpiece”
is the biggest song on the album, without question, even if it’s not the fastest.
That honor goes to “Humans,” even if it opens without a clear beat, and that probably
constitutes this “Masterpieces’” lone “rocker.” “Interstate” comes closest
after, but even that one’s at least a step behind mid-tempo. That’s not
judging, by the way, as one of those “caveat emptor’ situations: Big Thief is, emphatically, not a “party” band. I mean, god, everyone would collapse in tears in an hour.

Bands
that play like Big Thief, no matter how well they do it, and that always make
me wonder a bit about why they get into the music/touring lifestyle. They’ll
never be Van Halen; they will never have their “Panama” (that said, I’d
absolutely love to hear their take on that song). That goes beyond the low-key…everything.
They get some big sounds out of those guitars, but only here and there – e.g. “Masterpiece”
and the chorus-esque crescendos in “Real Love.” After that, just about everything
else they play feels as if their music would get lost to sadly wander in any room
that seats more than a couple hundred people.

I
can’t see Big Thief hitting the festival circuit, basically, or selling out a
big payday venue, at least not at current settings. (Also, massively out of touch, this guy. See Van Halen reference above.) Absent that kind of major
payout, I’m just not clear on how they sustain the level of success that even a
band like The Fastbacks managed. They all still have day jobs – nothing wrong
with that, either (honestly, it only makes them more relatable), but doesn’t that
mean your musical career comes with a ceiling and/or a dead-end?

A
thought lingers at the back of that: Big Thief makes love, passionately rich
music and, realistically, that makes their reasonably presumed future lack of “freedom
success” a bit tragic. Going back to “Real
Love,” one lyrical snippet I caught in that song – “Momma got drunk and daddy
went crazy,” and the way that carries from what feels like a “second mini-chorus”
to a, um, “pre-bridge (none of those are things, btw) – finally forced me to
start searching the web for Big Thief’s lyrics ("Real Love's"). As it turns out, Big Thief is
the Lays potato chips of lyrics – e.g., once you start looking you can’t stop.

Going
through their lyrics isn’t a happy experience, for the record, it’s closer to
reading the journal of a deeply impressionable girl living with the worst
family in any city you can imagine. I didn’t go find lyrics for every song on
Masterpiece – just “Real Love,” Velvet Ring,” (also, song) “Masterpiece,” and, just now “Interstate”
(song), because, man, that’s either a top 3 track, or shoving its way through that club’s
door – and, so far, no, not a single remotely happy song in the whole bunch.
Just sorrow, a bad past behind, and relationships destined to dissolve into a
puddle of tears ahead. There’s not a bad song on the entire album, though, it only
takes the right person to appreciate it. Personally, I picture someone who
never cares for herself, in spite of desperate need, because she’s trying to
keep the rest of the wounded from slouching into despair. “Misguided martyr
music” feels simultaneously glib and not so far off.

I
want to wrap this up with the one song from Masterpiece that I pulled onto a
later playlist than “Masterpiece,” “Paul” (ugh, links are a mess; that's the song; also, (intense) live performance). If I had a vote (I don’t), this song
goes at the emotional/tonal center of the album. It has all the elements – the sorrow,
trying to live up to toughness, smart lyrical turns (“I’ll be record player,
baby, if you know what I mean/I’ll be the real tough cookie with the whiskey
breath/I’ll be the cure and the ______ and the cause of our death”) – just the
good storytelling that forms a solid foundation for a lot of my tastes. (Just
checked the actual lyrics and the that third bar actually reads, “I’ll be a
killer and a thriller and the cause of our death,” and, holy shit, yes, please,
let’s hang out.)

By
way of a somewhat loose impression, there’s a search at the heart of a lot of
the songs on Masterpiece. The woman who narrates the songs, whether it’s Lenker
or not, is nothing like a weak person; instead, she comes off strong and
resilient, but still searching hard enough for a harbor to take her share of
shortcuts. Oh, and the more I listen, the more I think she’s sailing a ship
with some number of holes that her past relationships drilled into the sides. It’s
personal stuff, in other words, the kind of thing you can’t scale up, not when
you’re trying to tell someone something incredibly painful and important. Those
are thoughts and songs for intimate spaces. I just wish we could somehow build
something bigger that could still accommodate songs like this.

There’s
no way everyone likes this album. But for shut-in days, or any night you spend
ruing a lifetime of limited choices and bad decisions, Masterpiece has something to say to you.